“They saw their injured country's woe;
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear, - but left the shield.”

―Philip Freneau

Saturday, December 3, 2011

A Secular Search for Meaning in the Heart of Universal Humanism

Exhortations to virtue?... or mischief?

Those interpreters who see Antigone as the proto-Christian figure are right: in her unconditional commitment she follows a different ethics that points towards Christianity (...)- why? Christianity introduces into the global balanced order of eunomia a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion: the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to universality (of the Holy Spirit, or today, of human rights and freedom) - I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my special place within the global social order.

- Slavoj Zizek, "Living in the End Times"

Equality of access bypassing/ trumping social orders of "rank" and thereby undermining all notions of 'authority', be they by nature derived from education, experience or birth.

Links

On Redemption

To redeem the past and to transform every ‘It was’ into an ‘I willed it thus!’ – that alone I call redemption!

Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

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Andrei Tarkovsky

“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means... I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it."